26 June 2012

Why it's now o.k. to boldly split infinitives

We are no longer speaking Old English or Latin, with their single-word
infinitives... Ænglisc-speakers could not have
said "to boldly go", since the infinitive was a single word, "gān".
They'd have had to say "gān bealde", or something like that. Similarly,
Latin speakers wouldn't have had the option: they'd have had to say "ire
audacter". (Forgive the probably awful Latin and Old English there.)
But we're not speaking Latin or Ænglisc, so it's just silly to limit
ourselves to the grammatical options available to them...

There are times when splitting is not just permissible but obligatory... If the quantity you are measuring more than doubles, where do you put
your infinitive? ... [instead of]
"to more than double", what would you suggest? "We expect it more than
to double" or "We expect it to double more than"? The first is weird;
the second is even weirder.

11 comments:

To my understanding splitting infinitives was never a genuine rule, but originated with the Victorians, who never fully understood the difference between the trully unsplittable Latin infinitives and the splittable full infinitives in modern English.

In Latin, the infinitive is a single word without a prepositional marker so you can't split it even if you take an axe to it.

As you're saying, the "to" was not always part of the infinitive and it was added as the English language evolved. This is why we still distinguish between the bare infinitives (just the verb)and the full infinitives (verb and particle).

According to "Grammar Girl" the rule against splitting infinitives could be traced back to an 1864 book called The Queen's English by Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury.

On split infinitives, Alford wrote, “A correspondent states as his own usage, and defends, the insertion of an adverb between the sign of the infinitive mood and the verb. He gives the instance 'to scientifically illustrate.' But surely this practice is entirely unknown to English speakers and writers. It seems to me that we ever regard the 'to' of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb. And when we have the choice between the two forms of expression 'to scientifically illustrate' and 'to illustrate scientifically,' there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage.”

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/split-infinitives.aspx

from the same article:

"Actually, other writers started arguing with Alford about his assertion pretty quickly, but for some reason his dictum caught on with teachers who started teaching it as a strict rule, and some continue to do so to this day, even though you won't find a modern grammar book or style guide that says you should never split an infinitive."

I happened on this today. It presents the descriptivism-prescriptivism debate as, of all things, class warfare. It also makes good points in support of both sides, so prepare for blood-pressure elevation in three...two...one...

I do consider prescriptivism to be inherently classist; after all, the "prescribed" dialect is always the one used by the educated or powerful. Everyone else is misled that their form of speech is "uneducated" or somehow wrong, and those seeking respect will try to adopt the local prestigious dialect.

I'm not classist by any means, but when I put on my editor's hat I default to prescriptive. The problem I have with descriptive is that it sometimes runs so far ahead of the majority's understanding of a word or phrase that it has no meaning for a large number of readers.

As for speech and dialect, they're outside my field of expertise or interest. But if most people wrote the way they spoke, you wouldn't want to read it.

I believe one ought to draw a distinction between the terms "prescriptive" and "prescriptivist".

Everyone agrees that there is a time and a place for being prescriptive. As an editor, you prescribe every time you make informed recommendations about how someone else's writing might be improved. It is therefore an inherently prescriptive activity, but in no sense is it necessarily prescriptivist.

"There are times when splitting is not just permissible but obligatory... If the quantity you are measuring more than doubles, where do you put your infinitive? ... [instead of] "to more than double", what would you suggest? "We expect it more than to double" or "We expect it to double more than"? The first is weird; the second is even weirder."

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